In computer networking, load balancing may be a technique to distribute workload evenly across two or more computers, network links, CPUs, hard drives, or other resources. Load balancing can help optimal resource utilization, maximize throughput, minimize response time, and/or avoid overload. Using multiple components with load balancing, (e.g., instead of a single component), can increase reliability through redundancy. The load balancing service may be provided by a dedicated program or hardware device (e.g., a multilayer switch, a DNS server). Load balancing may be implemented by physical hardware. The hardware implementation may be costly.
Distributed Load Balancing (DLB) may be a type of load balancing. Compared to a centralized load balancing solution, a DLB solution may not have a central load balancer, hence has no performance bottleneck and single point of failure. The DLB may be implemented at a guest operating system (OS) level in a virtualization environment. Implementing the DLB at the OS level may be inefficient because each inbound network packet may need to be delivered to every guest in a DLB cluster, and a load balancing decision for the packet may be made among all of the guests. In an environment with many guests, such a decision may be time and/or resource clogging, and it may limit the scalability of a DLB cluster. Additionally, the guest OS level implementation may not be transparent to the OS of the guests.